Comment Re:Are you kidding me? (Score 1) 329
So that means i shouldn't give the prince my bank account # too???
Comment This is for criminals? (Score 2, Insightful) 97
Why not just label the vending machine "Pinata" and wait for all the outstanding resident of these prisons to spend their mass quantities of free time play whack-a-mole on this baby till it rains pharmaceutical goodness. Brilliant
Submission + - SPAM: Marines want lots of robots they can throw
coondoggie writes: "The US Marine Corp has a request — build and rapidly deploy more 10lb or under robots its personnel can throw into dangerous situations that can quickly gather information without endangering Marines.
The throwable robot is part of a family of robots that would range from the 10lb version, to one that would act as a central controlling device and weigh close to 300lbs. Marine commanders are demanding ever lighter robots so that troops don't have to offload critical equipment from their rucksacks to accommodate them.
[spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Robots Are The Chefs In This Japanese Restaurant (singularityhub.com)
Singularity Hub writes: "A Ramen restaurant has just opened in Nagoya, Japan that uses robots instead of humans as its chefs. It may not seem that amazing at first, but once you see the video it is hard not to be blown away. The robotic chefs work their gastronomic magic in a kitchen placed front and center in the middle of the restaurant, giving customers a front row seat on the action."
Submission + - A dark day for internet trolls 1
Anonymous Coward writes: "In August 2008, a user of Blogger.com, Google's blogging service, created "Skanks in NYC," a site that assailed Liskula Cohen, 37, a Canadian-born onetime cover girl who has appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines. The blog featured photos of Cohen captioned with terms including "psychotic," "ho," and "skank." On Monday, New York Supreme Court Judge Joan Madden ruled that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information it possesses about the blog's creator.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/18/new.york.model.blog.lawsuit/index.html"
Submission + - In the Underworld, the game plays you! (www.itu.dk)
togelius writes: "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers. Researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research have now mined this data to find out who you are! Using self-organizing neural networks, they classified players as either Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists or Runners. It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories. These neural networks can now instantly find out which of these you belong to based on just seeing you play. In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."
Comment reviews (Score 5, Funny) 99
The positive reviews for this will total 140 characters or less
Comment Timeframe (Score 1) 3
Aya-toll-yah to go build me that bomb!
*cue flying shoes*
Submission + - SPAM: 15-ton bomb would become the Father Of All Bombs
coondoggie writes: "Now this is one big bomb. Published reports today say the Pentagon is rattling swords in the direction of North Korea and Iran by speeding the development a 20-foot, 30,000lb bomb known as Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) meant to annihilate underground bunkers and other hardened (re: long range missile or underground nuke development) sites.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency which has overseen the development of this monster since 2007, says it is designed to be carried aboard B-2 and B-52 bombers and deployed at high altitudes where it would strike the ground at speeds well beyond 2X the speed of sound to penetrate the below ground target.
[spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - People Emit Visible Light (aol.com)
Anonymous Coward writes: "The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."
Submission + - Armadillo A. Flight Paves Way for Science Payloads (spacefellowship.com)
Matt_dk writes: "Armadillo Aerospace conducted two groundbreaking atmospheric test flights this weekend with their "Mod" vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing rocket, a vehicle familiar to anyone who has followed NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge competitions. Flying from their test facility in Caddo Mills, Texas, Armadillo Aerospace first completed a milestone flight under a NASA contract, using methane fuel and liquid oxygen as propellant. Later that same afternoon, a second successful low-altitude flight was performed using a "boosted hop" trajectory of the same type that will be used for suborbital flights to space."
Submission + - NASA has the lost tapes (nasa.gov)
caffiend666 writes: "A Speculated a few weeks ago, NASA has found and is starting to restore the lost Apollo 11 tapes. A Briefing will be held July 16th "at the Newseum in Washington to release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. " "The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards.""
Submission + - Sequencing a Human Genome in a Week (oreilly.com) 2
blackbearnh writes: The Human Genome Project took 13 years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be talking about his work at OSCON in a session titled The Freedom to Cure Cancer: Open Source Software in Genomics, and gave O'Reilly Radar a sense of where the state of the art in genome sequencing is heading. "Now the difficulty is pushing further and further down the pipeline, if you will. Now we can run these instruments. We can generate a lot of data. We can align it to the human reference. We can detect the variance. We can determine which variance exists in one genome versus another genome. Those variances that are cancerous, specific to the cancer genome, we can annotate those and say these are in genes. These ones that are in genes change the protein that that gene is encoding. These ones are in regulatory regions. These ones are in non-repetitive regions. So we can do all of those things relatively easily. Now the difficulty is following up on all of those and figuring out what they mean for the cancer. And, okay, we know they're different. We know that they exist in the cancer genome, but which ones are drivers and which ones are passengers? And what that means is which are the ones that were the cancer initiating events and which are the ones that are just coming along for the ride and don't really have anything to do with the tumor genesis or the disease itself but, just because cancer is so out of control and lots of things have gone wrong in the cell, finding which ones are actually causative is becoming more and more the challenge now."
Submission + - ATMs Armed with Pepper Spray (wired.com)
fysdt writes: A South African bank has outfitted its ATMs with pepper spray to prevent criminals from bombing or tampering with the machines. But the system still has some bugs: One of the machines released its stinging payload on three maintenance workers last week.
Submission + - Tomorrow's Science Heroes?
An anonymous reader writes: As a kid (and still now) I was heavily influenced by Carl Sagan and a little later by Stephen Hawking. Now as I have started a family with two kids (currently age 5 and 2) I am wondering who out there is popularizing science. Currently, my wife and I can get the kids excited about the world around them, but I'd like to find someone inspiring from outside the family as they get older. Sure, we'll always have 'Cosmos,' but are there any contemporaries who are trying to bring science into the public view in such a fun and intriguing way? Someone the kids can look up to and be inspired by? Where is the next Science hero?
